Google can predict the spread of the seasonal flu from Internet search queries it receives. Airplane engine manufacturers can predict when an engine part will break before it actually does, allowing that part to be changed at a convenient time and place, rather than when the airplane is in mid-flight. A startup company, Inrix offers a smartphone app that helps about one hundred million users every day to drive from home to work and back; providing real time information that allows them to avoid heavy traffic. And a Dutch mobile phone operator discovered that changes in the signal strength of cell towers could be translated into local weather data, thus giving the operator a potentially lucrative and very comprehensive network of thousands of weather stations capturing real-time data.